There’s something unsettling about cornfields. It’s all those dry, sharp blades stabbing upwards, and stalks tall enough for a monster to hide among. And everything about clowns is disturbing, figures who choose to inhabit an uncanny valley of exaggerated features and inhumanly large feet. Put the two together and of course you get an effective, gory teen slasher with a keen sense of genre savvy.
Katie Douglas plays Quinn, a big-city girl who must learn to negotiate a small town that’s barely hanging on after the local corn-syrup factory burned down. At school she falls in with a gang of pranksters who make YouTube videos reimagining the factory’s clown mascot, Frendo, as a serial killer, but wouldn’t you know it, Frendo might really be out there killing people.
Expect twists on the usual clichés.
So far, so basic, and it would be a spoiler to say much more about the plot. But given that director Eli Craig previously brought us the gonzo Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil, expect twists on the usual clichés. There are shades of Scream, Children Of The Corn, and maybe even Hot Fuzz in what follows. This is clearly a town with secrets (who burned down the ol’ corn-syrup factory?) but Craig toys with explanations both supernatural and not, and offers a multitude of suspicious locals to look at askance.
There are also laughs, sometimes at the technological dependence of Gen Z and some very much with the kids. Craig cuts time on character and scene-setting to a minimum to race as quickly as possible to the gory stuff, just like Frendo eschews any signature weapon in favour of whatever is to hand, as long as it’s horrible. This is a lean, stripped-back effort, with clockwork-regular kills and a clear sense of escalation. It’s possible that the plot does not, ultimately, make much sense, but the revelations and the splatter come so thick and fast in the final act that you hardly have time to worry about it. Keep your eye on the clowns and the cornfields instead; it’s a much better survival strategy.